Home > New York Times' Sunday Review Goes Wall-to-Wall for Obama's Re-Election

New York Times' Sunday Review Goes Wall-to-Wall for Obama's Re-Election

By

Clay Waters

October 29, 2012 - 4:53pm

New York Times Editorial Page editor Andrew Rosenthal's Sunday Review was
wall-to-wall for Obama this week, with two left-wing op-eds on Obama on
the front page, a full-page endorsement of Obama for re-election, and
three liberal columnists simultaneously obsessed with abortion,
including the paper's foreign policy columnist Thomas Friedman.
(Right-of-center Ross Douthat also covered women's issues, but
questioned Obama's "weirdly paternalistic form of social liberalism.")

On Page 1 of the Sunday Review, "The Price of a Black President[1]"
by Frederick Harris (director of the Institute for Research in
African-American Studies at Columbia University) praised blacks for
voting for Obama before going on to criticize Obama from the left.

When
African-Americans go to the polls next week, they are likely to support
Barack Obama at a level approaching the 95 percent share of the black
vote he received in 2008. As well they should, given the symbolic
exceptionalism of his presidency and the modern Republican Party’s utter
disregard for economic justice, civil rights and the social safety net.

The
other Page 1 op-ed was by Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winning
economist and scold who is also a professor at Columbia University (no
Upper West Side liberalism here!). He wrote on his current obsession, inequality[2].

Mitt
Romney has been explicit: inequality should be talked about only in
quiet voices behind closed doors. But with the normally conservative
magazine The Economist publishing a special series showing the extremes
to which American inequality has grown -- joining a growing chorus (of
which my book “The Price of Inequality” is an example) arguing that the
extremes of American inequality, its nature and origins, are adversely
affecting our economy -- it is an issue that not even the Republicans
can ignore. It is no longer just a moral issue, a question of social
justice.

Stiglitz went on to bust "economic myths," including: "America is a land of opportunity....Trickle-down economics works."

Our
mom, a strict Catholic, taught us that it was immoral for a woman to be
expected to carry a rapist’s baby for nine months. (Don’t even mention
that rapists can assert parental rights in 31 states.)

But
compassion is scant among the Puritan tribe of Republicans running now.
As The Huffington Post reports, at least a dozen G.O.P. Senate
candidates oppose abortion for rape victims. The party platform calls
for a constitutional amendment with no exceptions for rape, incest or
the mother’s life.

Dowd predictably bashed two Republican election
seekers, Rep. Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, for controversial
comments related to abortion and rape, then went into full condescension
mode to explain why women may vote for the Republican ticket anyway:

Republicans are geniuses at getting people to vote against their own self-interest.
Hispanics, however, do not seem inclined to vote against their
self-interest on immigration laws, and Obama is counting on that to buoy
him.

Even foreign policy columnist Thomas Friedman got into the act, under the sarcastic headline "Why I Am Pro-Life[5]."
Of course he's not actually against abortion, he'st just making the
tired government argument that "pro-life" also means things like more
money for the EPA and Head Start. He also details the Akin and Mourdock
controversies. (Are Obama supporters highlighting anything else at this
point?)

Sunday also offered an official full-page endorsement of
President Obama. (No surprise: The last Republican the paper endorsed
was Dwight Eisenhower in 1956.) Principled liberals might like to know
that the long editorial offered not one word on drone attacks or the
other war on terror issues Obama has embraced, instead.

The paper warned: "An
ideological assault from the right has started to undermine the vital
health reform law passed in 2010. Those forces are eroding women’s
access to health care, and their right to control their lives. Nearly 50
years after passage of the Civil Rights Act, all Americans’ rights are
cheapened by the right wing’s determination to deny marriage benefits to
a selected group of us. Astonishingly, even the very right to vote is
being challenged."

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